How mortality varies with age
Data source
We’re using data from the Human Mortality Database, a standardised and curated collection of mortality data from countries around the world. For this analysis we’ll concentrate on the World Bank’s ‘high-income countries’ in that database, averaged over the five most recent years of data.
Citation
HMD. Human Mortality Database. Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Germany), University of California, Berkeley (USA), and French Institute for Demographic Studies (France). Available at www.mortality.org.
Graphs
Results
Assuming the graph looks OK, you’ve done it! And we can now calculate a few numbers describing the data…
- The mortality rate doubling time, the amount of time it takes for risk of death to double, is 8.68 years.
- The safest age to be is 9 years old. The chance of you not making your 10th birthday is 0.00975%, or 1 in 10300
- The next safest ages are 10 and 8, with odds of death in that year of 0.0101% and 0.0103%.
- An 80-year-old is 37.8 times more likely to die than a 30-year-old.
- Your risk of death doesn’t exceed your risk in the first year of life until you’re 53 years old.
- Your risk of death exceeds 1% when you’re 62 years old.
- Your risk of death aged 91 is 1 in 5.89, worse than a dice roll.
Finally, here are some odds of death at various ages:
| age | risk of death | 1/risk | odds of reaching |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0.461% | 217 | 100% |
| 1 | 0.0353% | 2830 | 99.5% |
| 10 | 0.0101% | 9940 | 99.4% |
| 20 | 0.0631% | 1580 | 99.1% |
| 30 | 0.125% | 799 | 98.3% |
| 40 | 0.195% | 514 | 96.8% |
| 50 | 0.388% | 258 | 94.3% |
| 53 | 0.492% | 203 | 93.1% |
| 60 | 0.887% | 113 | 89% |
| 62 | 1.04% | 96.3 | 87.4% |
| 65 | 1.26% | 79.1 | 84.5% |
| 70 | 1.8% | 55.5 | 78.6% |
| 80 | 4.73% | 21.1 | 58.8% |
| 90 | 15.2% | 6.58 | 24.2% |
| 91 | 17% | 5.89 | 20.5% |
| 100 | 40.4% | 2.47 | 1.26% |
About this report
This report was last updated on 7th February 2025.
This report was generated from an R script which performs the underlying calculations. The code and console output have been removed to make it easier to read. If you want to see the code, you can check out the latest version at GitHub, and if you want to view the console output, see mortality-with-age.txt.